Uptight To Alright!

Some of you are familiar with the “Urban Dictionary,” which is described as a crowd-sourced online dictionary of slang words and phrases, founded in 1999 as a parody of the traditional online resources. So if you’d like to find out if a word is still in common usage — especially among our youth — then this is one place to start. For example, you will find that the familiar term “uptight,” — which was first used in the 1930s — is still alive and kicking according to the Urban Dictionary, and for obvious reasons will remain fashionable for a long time to come.

According to some social scientists, the “uptight” person is not neurotic, but normal. It is fashionable, it seems, to get uptight about all sorts of things that everyone else is uptight about. It is fashionable, it seems, to be uptight about “getting ahead”; uptight about paying the bills; uptight about political problems; uptight about social problems; even uptight about being uptight.